Hospitality SEO builds location and amenity-specific pages matching traveller search behaviour, structured to work with the booking engine rather than around it. First ranking movement typically shows at weeks 8-12, and rankings that convert directly reduce OTA commission dependence over time.
What's different about hospitality SEO?
- Location and amenity pages, not just a generic homepage
- Booking-engine-friendly URL structure and page speed
- Review volume and rating feed directly into local ranking
Every OTA booking has a price tag
If a guest finds you on an online travel agency, you pay commission on the stay, often somewhere in the mid-teens as a percentage. If they find you on your own site, you do not. Hospitality SEO is simply the long-term project of moving more of those first searches onto pages you own.
That means pages built for how guests actually search: the neighbourhood, the landmark, the event, the type of stay. "Hotel near the convention centre with parking" is a real search with real booking intent, and it is rarely answered well by a hotel homepage.
Google gave hotels a free channel, and many still ignore it
In March 2021 Google opened free hotel booking links on Google Travel to hotels worldwide, not just paid advertisers (Search Engine Journal, March 2021). If your booking engine is connected, your own rate can sit next to the OTAs at no media cost. We check that connection early in every hospitality engagement, because it is the cheapest direct-booking win there is.
Reviews move rankings and bookings. BrightLocal's 2025 survey found 86% of consumers use Google to read reviews, and 40% are most likely to leave one after an email request (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2025). A simple post-stay email does more for local visibility than most link building.
What we build
- Location and landmark pages that answer "where to stay near" searches
- Room, amenity and package pages that link cleanly to the booking engine
- Event and seasonal pages published ahead of demand, not during it
- Hotel structured data and a connected Google Business Profile for each property
- A speed pass on the booking path, because slow pages send guests back to the OTA
How we measure it
We track direct-booking revenue from organic search, not just traffic. If an OTA still wins most of your branded searches, we will show you, and pair SEO with brand search campaigns to take that traffic back.